The Soccer World Cup here in Germany

Well, at the moment it is really a special time here in Germany, in which everything - even business - becomes a second priority behind soccer! And in the end, after not getting any tickets via the Fifa-website, I got very lucky :-) : First I won a ticket in an company-internal lottery drawing for the game Trinidad & Tobago vs. Sweden and two days ago a friend called that he had one ticket left for the game Brazil vs. Croatia, because someone else could not go. So here are some impressions I got:

Trinidad&Tobago vs. Sweden in Dortmund
We started out in Berlin on Saturday morning by Bus. The drive took us almost 6 hours to get there, but luckely enough we had drinks and food on board - although the toilet was not working. We arrived at the bus parking spot and immediately saw thousands of yellow-dressed Swedish fans and red&black-dressed Trinis slowly moving to the stadium. The athmosphere was very friendly, everyone was smiling before the game and the wheather was great. I saw really crazy people that were painted all over their body, dancing, drinking, celebrating, singing and whisteling. We reached the great stadium quickly and our seats were right in between the Trini section in the upper section. We had a blast and the T&T-team got so lucky. I was sitting next to a very friendly guy from Trinidad, who said to me that god was simply for the underdog Trinidad&Tobago. :-) The swedish team had great chances to score a goal, hit the pole, but did not score. Therefore the swedish fans were really drunk (for them Beer was cheap in Germany... I thought 4 euros is pretty expensive...) and not smiling anymore in the end. But they were still willing to exchange T-Shirts or to have a picture taken. One guy said to me: "Hey, if we would have lost against Paraguay, that would have been ok, but a 0:0 against TnT was not good..." he was very sad, but hey, congratulations to the smalles country that ever participated in a world cup. They have less inhabitants than half of Berlin and probably 1/10 of a 1% was in the stadium. In the first world cup match for them - they did not loose - "A national holiday" the guy next to me said. The nice coloured lady in front of me kept dancing the whole game... On the way back to Berlin we all sang You You You...

Brazil vs. Croatia in Berlin
This game with 72.000 people sold out in the Olympic stadium. Again a beautiful day and I was sitting in the brazilian fan section. I had a little bit of trouble to get in, because the chip in my ticket was broken, but I arrived on my seat in the last seconds before they played the enthyms. I expected a lot of samba and a good athmosphere, but the game was bad and therefore the fans kept quiet... The 1:0 was ok, but the Brazilian team really did not show a good team effort and a willingness to play nice. I was escpecially disappointed in the performance of the big stars like Ronaldo or Ronaldinho or Roberto Carlos... The croatians tried hard in the second half and a goal would have only been fair... The subway was packed with fans and again they all celebrated peacefully.

Summary
Here in Berlin, you can currently meet a lot of soccer fans from all over the world and it really seems everyone is happy and enjoying the sport. We seem to be a good host - at least I hope so. And, as millions of other German countrymen I welcome everybody and in these days I am especially fascinated of my beautiful country, I wear the black, red and yellow flag with proud and I enjoy the new German and global spirit that you can feel everywhere. We celebrate together with our friends from around the globe...